Unequal Law

Few legal asymmetries in India expose the uneasy bargain between secularism, vote-bank politics, and gender justice as starkly as the continuing permissibility of polygamy for Muslim men. While Hindu, Christian, Sikh and Parsi men have been bound by monogamy for decades, Sunni Muslim personal law still allows up to four wives.

For decades, India’s political class has treated Muslim polygamy as an awkward inheritance best left untouched. That uneasy settlement is now under strain following the recent landmark survey by the Bhartiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA), based on 2,508 Sunni women across seven states.

The survey has dragged the hidden costs of polygamy out of private misery and into the national ledger. Its findings are profoundly political. The BMMA documents sharp health deterioration among first wives: chronic sleep disorders, hypertension, migraines, thyroid dysfunction, menstrual problems and diabetes - all at rates significantly higher than among second wives. Mental health outcomes are grimmer still. Insomnia, anxiety, depression, helplessness and social withdrawal stalk the first wife with disturbing regularity.

Since Independence, successive governments have treated Muslim personal law as a domain too electorally sensitive to reform. The bitter memory of the Shah Bano case in 1985 when Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress-led government overturned a Supreme Court judgment granting maintenance rights to a divorced Muslim woman under pressure from conservative clerics has cast a long shadow. It taught politicians that touching Muslim personal law carried the price of organised backlash, and possibly electoral loss.

Apologists insist polygamy is rare, or that it is divinely regulated when in fact it embeds a hierarchy in law between men and women, and among women themselves. It legalises emotional, economic and sexual asymmetry under the authority of the state. It weakens women’s bargaining power inside marriage and normalises abandonment under the disguise of legality.

The Supreme Court has described polygamy as an “injurious practice” even while acknowledging its legal status under Muslim personal law. Several Muslim-majority countries - from Tunisia to Turkey - have banned it altogether. India, for all its constitutional claims, remains on the more regressive side of this divide.

Why the hesitation? The answer lies in the peculiar coalition that has guarded this privilege. Conservative religious bodies defend polygamy as theological necessity. So-called ‘secular intellectuals,’ wary of being seen as ‘majoritarian,’ treat criticism of regressive Muslim practices as cultural trespass.

This is not secularism but a clear abdication of women’s rights which these secularists and feminists claim to champion in so shrill a manner. The irony that these upholders of secularist values fail to see is that Muslim women themselves have been among the most persistent voices for change. They ask for the same marital certainty that other Indian women take for granted.

Banning polygamy may not instantaneously transform social behaviour. But it will declare, unambiguously, that the Indian state recognises only one equal partnership at a time. That is not a cultural imposition. It is the minimum architecture of modern gender justice.